“The Leaven, Regarding the Lump”

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Notes

Katherine Hopewell is a lecturer in the Department of Lifelong Learning at the University of Wales Bangor, where she teaches on a part-time degree in literature and co-ordinates the MA Women's Studies programme. Her doctoral dissertation on H.D. and film was completed in 2003. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of British Women's Writing 1900–1950 (Palgrave), and her current research is on the Welsh writer Brenda Chamberlain [email protected]

1. See Susan Friedman and Rachel Blau Du Plessis (1990, pp. xi–xvi) for a detailed account of the development of H.D.'s critical reputation.

2. See Eileen Gregory (1997) and Diana Collecott (1999).

3. Charlotte Mandel (1980) was the first to point out this connection.

4. See, for instance, Andreas Huyssen (1986), who does indeed consider gender but only from the perspective of male writers' interactions with a feminised mass. A particularly extreme case for viewing modernists such as Pound and Eliot as elitists is put by John Carey (1992).

5. Recent growing interest in Close Up has led to the publication of a volume (James Donald, Anne Friedberg & Laura Marcus 1998) reprinting extended selections from the journal (including eight of H.D.'s eleven pieces).

6. For a portrait of the artistic and sexual dynamics of the POOL group, and the process surrounding the making of Borderline see Barbara Guest (1985) and Susan Friedman (1990).

7. See especially Adalaide Morris (1984) who has written about H.D.'s adoption of filmic processes as metaphors of creative vision, and Charlotte Mandel (1980, 1983); the pioneer of H.D. film studies. Also, Anne Friedberg (1983, 1987, 1998) has done invaluable recovery work in rescuing and making known the films with which H.D. was involved, and in positioning Close Up as a predecessor of the psychoanalytic film theory of the 1980s.

8. For making it possible for me to view these rare films, I would like to acknowledge the professional help of the Goethe Institute and the kind generosity of film historian Kevin Brownlow.

9. For instance, see Siegfried Kracauer's sweeping, sexist attack in “The Little Shop-Girls Go to the Movies” (appearing at the same time as H.D.'s essays in Close Up), which is based on the supposed gullibility of women spectators Kracauer, 1995, pp. 290–304.

10. See Bryher's (1931) humorous parody of Battleship Potemkin (1925) as a Hollywood production might have presented it, demonstrating Bryher's belief, shared by most of the contributors to Close Up, that Hollywood films were more often kitsch than art.

11. Rachel Connor (2004, p. 28) makes exactly this point. For a fuller discussion of this aspect of H.D.'s article, and also of the way in which it represents an early attempt to theorise spectatorship from a female perspective, see Katherine Hopewell (2003).

12. Mandel notes that “the film in the novel is not identified” (1980, p. 132) but focuses her discussion on The Joyless Street.

13. I was informed by Kevin Brownlow that this was achieved by using a specially ground lens in the filming (letter to the author, December 11, 2000).

14. For more on the “feminising” of the masses by early sociologists such as Gustave Le Bon, see Huyssen (1986).

15. See Hopewell (2003) for a comparison between Barry's approach as a reviewer with H.D.'s film writings.

16. I find myself subject to analogous constraints in the writing of this article: scholarly discourse continues to exclude certain feminine-identified types of language and modes of relating. See Jane Tompkins' important discussion of this subject in “Me and My Shadow” (1987).

17. For a particularly penetrating example of this, see Melba Cuddy-Keane's recent study of Virginia Woolf (2003).

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Katherine Hopewell

† Katherine Hopewell is a lecturer in the Department of Lifelong Learning at the University of Wales Bangor, where she teaches on a part-time degree in literature and co-ordinates the MA Women's Studies programme. Her doctoral dissertation on H.D. and film was completed in 2003. She is a contributor to the forthcoming Encyclopaedia of British Women's Writing 1900–1950 (Palgrave), and her current research is on the Welsh writer Brenda Chamberlain [email protected]